THE ROCK ON WHICH IT IS BUILT 181
The Sacred creates the sentiment of Reverence. It also creates the sentiment that it is inviolate. When a belief becomes consecrated as a Sacred thing, it is forbidden to touch it, to deny it or to contest it. There is a prohibition of criticism of the Sacred. The Sacred is ‘untouchable and above discussion’. When an individual is saturated with these sentiments, when these sentiments become a part of his being, he himself becomes an upholder and protector of what he is taught to regard as something sacred.
This is exactly what the Hindus have done in the matter of Caste. They have given caste a place in the Vedas. Caste has thereby become sacred because the Vedas are Sacred. It would be wrong to say that the Vedas are sacred because they are religious. The position is that they are religious because they are sacred.
It might appear that the Hindus have no name for the Veda directly expressing the feeling of sacredness which the Hindu entertains towards the Vedas. Veda simply means knowledge. That may be so. But there can be no doubt that they regard the Vedas as sacred. Indeed the term they apply to Vedas expresses a far greater degree of reverence than the word sacred does. They call the Vedas Shruti —which means the word of God heard by (i.e. revealed to) man. In the primitive religion the Sacred is what man has made. In the Hindu religion the Sacred is what God has appointed it to be.
The Hindus regard the Vedas as the Sacred Book of their religion. They put the Vedas in a class by themselves. The Hindus hold [1] that there are cycles of creations called Kalpas. At the end of every cycle there is a deluge and a new cycle of creation begins. At the end of a Kalpa, the Vedas are destroyed in the deluge. At the beginning of every Kalpa they are revealed by God. Accordingly the Vedas were destroyed in the deluge at the end of the last Kalpa and that the beginning of the present Kalpa commencing with the Krita Yug, they were revealed by God to the Rishis. The Vedas are regarded by the Hindus as Nitya (enternal) Anadi (beginningless) and Apaurusheya (not made by man), In short the Vedas are the words of God and constitute God’s ordinances to man.
Even if the Vedas were not called Shruti they would have had the imperativeness of the ‘Sacred’. Religions have been variously classified by Prof. Max Muller. [2] Natural as against Revealed is one way of classifying them. Individual as against National is another way. The third way of classifying them is to call them Atheistic, Deitistic, Dualistic, Polytheistic, Monotheistic, Henotheistic and Animistic. True
1 M. Krishnamachariar—Classical Sanskrit Literature. Introduction, pp. vii-viii and p. 836.
2 Introduction to the Science of Religion.